STAGE AND SCREEN The Theatre
"King Lear." By William thikespeare. At The Old Vic
Sees.-ri : Britain," says the programme ; and in the last act the author refers to the army which Albany and Gloucester
lead against the French as the " British " forces. Now a
Briton, in . Shakespeare's eyes was very different from a Britisher in. ours ;. he was a remote, and what the Anglo-
Indians call a jungly creature. There can be little doubt that Shakespeare wrote the tragedy with the conception of a primitive and barbarous people at the back of his mind ; and a production of the play which gives due weight to this conception increases its chances of success. The fundamental improbabilities of the opening scene lose much of their power to annoy if we remember that we are dealing with a people who seemed as wild and woolly to the Elizabethans as the Mongols . do to us. Lear's " reservation of an hundred knights," and his daughters' anxiety to reduce it, are not trivialities in an age when good weapons were scarce and a standing army was unknown. In the same way Regan's excilse that she cannot entertain the whole bodyguard acquires a certain validity if Regan's background has the right atmo- sphere of stark and ill-provided feudalism. The spaciousness and violence of the play gain, all along the line, from an imaginatively " period " handling ; it is rugged, stormy stuff, and it ought to look rugged and stormy.
The Old Vie production gets away to a flying start in the right direction with a cold, spare, monolithic setting and by hinting at sun-worship in the first scene. But the clothes are terrible, and the storm-scene is wrecked in the staging. Here the only help that author and actor require from the stage- manager is an electric fan Which, by ruffling beard and draperies, conveys the needed touch of realism : the Old Vie gives us a distracting panorama of clouds and a Lear too conspicuously impervious to the. climate.
But the play is acted strongly and moves at a great pace ; and Mr. William Devlin's Lear is a great—a truly great—per- formance. His voce has a terrific range ; his reading of the part is .brilliantly intelligent ; and yet he is so successful in arousing, our pity and our awe that we never once ignore the tragedy to admire the four de force. The rest of the cast were up to standard, but the Producer's most signal error was 'Making 'that &linkable actor, Mr. Morland Graham, play the Foot. Since Maeready gave the part to a girl in 1888 it can seldom have been worse miscast.
Previous page
